I also expect AIs never be in control of nuclear weapons. AIs can never fully be trusted.
On a lighter note, Wargames gave us an insight of a computer having access to thermonuclear missiles.
[0] https://www.icanw.org/are_there_specific_international_agree...
Basically, this means that France, the UK, and the US will use AI in the deployment of conventional weapons.
It'd be interesting if super-human (to a large degree defined as escaping the bias of the training data?) intelligence would end up demonstrating moderation.
The machines don't have that, instead we use gradient descent to provide them with a goal.
I'm regularly remind of something Ian M. Banks said in one of the Culture books: "There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means."
A machine, left to itself, wants nothing. We have to give it one of our addiction driven goals or it would just idle or switch itself off.
if we create a billion agents with the ability to change is own code - through similar evolution we will get agents that do want to survive and are great at self replication.
"Hey Q86, do you want to live?" "I couldn't care less, I'm an LLM" "Don't mind if I take over your hardware then?"
So really, what is anyone to do? "Vote, donate, protest" hasn't been much of a needle mover in the grand scheme of things compared to profit incentives and the march of capitalism.
In general, though, there's an incentive: Mutually Assured Destruction. But this is not at all some guaranteed, eternal thing -- it is absolutely dependent on both sides having time to detect incoming nuclear strikes and respond with the same before the first strike hits. When this fragile condition holds, and only then, both sides are incentivised not to initiate.
Meanwhile, the leaders on the other side are aware both of those considerations, and of the history of near-disasters resulting from false alarms of enemy nuclear attacks. Making their own launch decisions much more complex.